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VOMITO COGITO 33 On the windshield, the sun and The whole land forward, forever, All washed in blood, in feathers, in gut-scrawl. Warren's bloody windshield, like Snyder's chronicle of "The Dead by the Side of the Road" and William Stafford's fallen deer, is a totem of alarm. "And by this we are carried into the incalculable," wrote George Oppen. Strange to be here, strange for them also, insane and criminal, who hasn't noticed that, strange to be man, we have come rather far We are at the beginning of a radical depopulation of the earth. Oppen's warning is addressed not to the narcotized consciousness of the affluent American fairyland ("hygienic of / views not viable to this soil" where "The dust of intolerable social conditions packed like melting bombs floats the grease of the human condition"—or "Grimed tributaries to an ancient flow" in Hart Crane's line), but to those who know that the endless future world war is already well underway, and that this land is fueling—but ultimately fuel for—this war. ("One can be looted, burned, / bombed, etc., in company, / a Second World War sequel for real, / altogether, now and forever"; or Muriel Rukeyser:"American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict.... We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; on another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare" [Life of Poetry, 61]; "How much of it is still true with gene-pool smashed, / the end of knowing,"John Clarke wonders about "a world of ritual but no more time"). "Total war / has been uninstructive"; but "the gathered gestures of historic particulars do not extricate from direction the concentrations of responsibility"; "We will produce no sane man again." Vomito cogito "We will produce no sane man again." "Can this saying and this being unsaid be assembled, can they be atthe sametime?"—this isEmmanuel Levinas's question— "whether one can at the same time know and free the known of the marks which 3 4 T H I S C O M P O S T thematization leaves on it by subordinating it to ontology. Everything shows itself at the price of this betrayal, even the unsayable" (Otherwise Than Being, 7). "This kind of speaking / doubles the unspeakable." This ontological subordination is rendered explicitly historical by liberation theologist Enrique Dussel. "Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquin" he says, echoing Martinican poet Aime Cesaire's "Vomito Negro."* In the peripheralized existence of the conquered, the bilious retchings of the Cogito affirm the centrality of the empire of Being. "Being is; beings are what are seen and controlled" (Philosophy of Liberation, 6). [Mjodern European philosophy, even before the ego cogito but certainly from then on, situated all men and all cultures—and with them their women and children—within its own boundaries as manipulable tools, instruments. Ontology understood them as interpretable beings, as known ideas, as mediations or internal possibilities within the horizon of the comprehension of Being(3). The ego cogito is canonized as an assertion of centers and metropoles, in the calculus of a metaphysics of Being, an ideological countenance structured into a knot of presence-knowledge-language-law and its subsidiary fleet of orbiting satellites, "nature" and "culture," "self,"and "other." "Ontology," writes Dussel, "thethinking that expresses Being—the Being of the reigning and central system—is the ideology of ideologies, the foundation of the ideologies of the empires, of the center. Classical philosophy of all ages is the theoretical consummation of the practical oppression of peripheries" (5). This peremptory formulation forces a conclusion: global history is a canontology. Canontology—the canon or rule of Being—is artificial respiration, a life-support system: history as a prerogative of the West can be thought of as a comatose patient kept alive by a battery of hookups, an administrative milieu in which what is administered are prescriptive dosages through "stateof -the-art" apparatus linked to a vegetative function. History, as a canon, ensures that only certain people are beneficiaries of its life-support system. History is a mode of production, a technocracy that artificially sustains certain populations at the expense of other populations. But under the protocols of administrative rationality there is not even the ceremonial record of ritual sacrifice to remind the dominant community of the terms that underwrite its persistence. ' the white-toothed black flag...

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